


Impossible to Forget

by HeartOfTheMirror



Series: Well Shit, What Now? [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, but they've already slept together, sleeping, sort of preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 02:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1153551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartOfTheMirror/pseuds/HeartOfTheMirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles and Derek slept together once, when neither of them knew their names or why such a thing was a terrible, no good, very bad idea.</p><p>What happens when they remember? When the spell wears off and things go back to normal, or as normal as they get in Beacon Hills?</p><p>Can broken things ever really be fixed?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible to Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Finally got around to this! Not quite sure where it's going yet but I've got a vauge idea. Probably pretty short, only two or three more chapters.

Derek didn’t owe Stiles anything, least of all some kind of commitment or attention. It wasn’t like either of them really meant anything that happened, Stiles thought to himself, no matter what they said and did while hiding under the gnarled roots of the former nemeton. This wasn’t about that, this was about the shady way that Derek just blew town afterwards. 

He’d barely said goodbye to anyone and there hadn’t been so much as a word from the older wolf as to what he and his creepy uncle had been up to for those few months of radio silence. Which was why there was nothing weird about Stiles stalking Derek on his possible date-like-event. Nothing at all unusual in this. After all, hadn’t their entire ~~relationship~~ ~~friendship~~ alliance started after a friendly bit of stalking, grave desecration and framing for murder? 

Not that Stiles thought they’d be revisiting those last two mile markers tonight. But who knew when his not-alpha not-boyfriend was taking a beautiful girl in four inch high heels all around Beacon Hills like some smug asshole walking a prized show dog with amazing tits. 

“Stiles, that’s just the Red Bull talking man, you’ve gotta calm down,” Scott said, his voice muffled and whispery from where he was jammed awkwardly in the passenger seat, trying not to be seen by their maybe-packmate and his playdate and their sauntered with their aggressive attractiveness into a bank to deposit a check in a sexually suggestive manner or something. “You’re still saying that out loud Stiles,” Scott whispered, straightening a bit despite Stiles’s ever more emphatic hand motions that he not blow their cover. “You haven’t slept in three days and you’re narrating Derek’s errands in, like, a really disturbing way, it’s time for bed.”

“No,” Stiles said, his hands were shaking, sure, but it was just from the extra Red Bull. Maybe he had overdone it, but so what? 

“Allison and I are both fine. It’s safe, Stiles, it’s okay,” Scott said in that ernest puppy way of his. “If you go to sleep-”

“No!” Stiles snapped, his fingers gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles popped out white against the faux leather. Because Scott didn’t understand, still. Didn’t know the half of what Stiles had seen in his dreams or what it might mean. Not even Deaton could say for sure. 

What Stiles knew was that he dreamt that Derek had come back, Peter and Heather and his mother’s mouldering corpse had held him down while Derek had pressed his angular, familiar face over Stiles’s chest, ripped his rib cage open with his claws, and eaten Stiles’s heart straight from between his lungs while he screamed and struggled. Stiles had woken, he was pretty sure, and thrown himself at the toilet, vomiting up the greasy fries and burger from the night before.

And then he’d saved Lydia from the trap. 

And then Derek had come sauntering back into town without so much as a by your leave or a word as to where he’d been and just what he was doing back at the old loft.

Stiles knew he’d closed the door like the others, but nightmares never entirely went away. Not forever. From the second he heard that Derek was back in Beacon Hills he knew he couldn’t close his eyes. Nothing was worth enduring those images again, the horror and revulsion of it. So Stiles stayed awake and he kept his eyes on Derek whenever he could, like a child staring into an empty closet before bed. Because who knew what it might do if you turned your back on it?  
I was an odd thing to want something and be afraid of it all at once.

Stiles let Scott’s hand slowly reach out and take the keys. He felt his best friend’s hand on his shoulder and closed his dry, aching eyes.

…

Stiles paced around his empty room. He stood in front of his wall of evidence, ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, fisting them there and hanging his head, letting out a long frustrated whine. 

Scott had told him to sleep, had handed him two pills Mrs. McCall had said were safe. Non-habit forming. Stiles couldn’t swallow them. He’d tried. But every time he tried to constrict his throat he felt like he was going to vomit. He spat them out in frustration, flushed them and locked himself in his room.  
It was almost midnight. 

Stiles felt like his consciousness had been scythed from his body, was floating around somewhere, two inches above him and help on tenuously by some delicate intangible threat like a loose tooth. If he just kept tonging at it maybe it would snap off and he could be a ghost, his body rumpled on the ground like an unwashed sheet as the important part drifted above, set free from any feeling, any fear or pain.

“You’re not subtle.” Stiles screamed, jumped around, clutching at his painfully thudding heart. Derek was crouched in his window with a fresh new haircut, tight jeans and a tailored leather jacket. His eyebrows were scrunched in concern, the bastard.

“Dont. Do that!” Stiles screamed, grateful beyond words that his father was working tonight. Derek hopped off the ledge and into Stiles’s room as if that was an invitation.

He stepped toward Stiles and Stiles took a step back. 

“Don’t come any closer,” he said, trying to ignore the pain on the werewolf’s face. 

“Look, I know you’re upset but you don’t have to… I’m not going to do anything Stiles, I’m just here to talk. I swear.”

“Upset? Upset?!” Stiles yelled hysterically. “What the fuck do you think I have to be upset about exactly?”

“What happened in the woods…” Derek said slowly, sensing that this was a trap, but completely unsure how to evade it. “We agreed that it was just the spell. It wasn’t us. I thought I made myself clear when I left.” Stiles swallowed the insult, turning his head to the side and trying desperately to make sure his voice would be normal. 

“Oh you did. You don’t want anything to do with me. I get that. No reason to be a fucking asshole about it.” His head snapped back to Derek as he heard the other man’s bass growl of frustration. 

“That’s not what I meant! I’m just trying to tell you that you don’t need to worry about me _imposing_ on you or something. If I knew you still wanted me gone I wouldn’t have come back.” Derek clenched his hands into fists, stuffed them in his leather jacket, shifting his weight as Stiles looked on, struck into a rare state of speechlessness. 

“Scott told me you haven’t been sleeping. He wouldn’t say why though.” Stiles remained resolutely silent, let the segue slide, just kept his eyes on Derek and wondered if he was dreaming. “What’s going on Stiles?” Derek asked, truly concerned now. Silent was not something he associated with the teenager. It made him nervous.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Stiles finally snapped, sounding more exhausted than angry, fidgeting and framed by his obsessive collage of the unsolved.

There was a moment of damaged silence, while Stiles waited for Derek to scoff, to leave, to yell at Stiles, call him a stalker, a loser, an obsessive manic brat. But that didn’t happen. What happened was that Derek stepped closer, and though Stiles’s heart pounded, feeling like a rabbit staring down a shotgun, but he didn’t step back. Derek’s eyes were intense, reading every twitch of his expression with the vast effort of deciphering a foreign but essential language. 

“Are you afraid of me?” Derek asked. And the answer was emphatically “yes” but Stiles found himself captured, saying, “No.”

It took Derek several eons to cross over to Stiles, mostly because he was telegraphing his movements, going slow enough that Stiles, if he were going to object, wouldn’t be forced to do it at the last moment. There was part of him that wanted to, but he pushed it down because Derek was basically their friend, and he was so sick, so fucking sick, of being terrified all the time. He just wanted something good to happen. He just wanted, for once, to feel like he wasn’t less than, the vulnerability everyone else had to work around, be burdened with.

And then Derek, with the steely nerve of a man diffusing a bomb, reached out an arm and rested his hand on Stiles’s shoulder. With barely any pressure at all his fingertips nudged Stiles into stepping forward, the walk of a man on a plank. And then somehow he was being embraced. He was being embraced by a robot who had only read about the notion in a manual written in a rare ancient Japanese dialect and it was hella awkward, sure, but it also smelled like fresh leather, heady musk, sharp after shave, clean soap, and gasoline. 

Stiles closed his aching eyes, buried his face in the soft buttery leather of Derek’s jacket and held on. One of Derek’s hands was awkwardly patting Stiles’s shoulder and the other was rubbing rhythmically over Stiles’s lower back and that was okay. That was perfect, because this was Derek, the jerk whose bark was worse than his bite, whose offense was almost always his only defense, and who would wrinkle his nose in ~~adorable~~ distaste at the thought of eating human flesh.

This was Derek, who without his memory had still put his body between Stiles and danger. Who had sat naked before Stiles, a total stranger, and said he could do what he liked with Derek’s body. This was Derek who wouldn’t even register Stiles’s shitty attempt at stalking as anything other than an obvious call for attention.  
This was Derek and Stiles was safe. 

Stiles took a deep breath, clutching at the leather jacket, feeling the room sway. Derek knelt down and swept Stiles up into his arms. Stiles didn’t bother to open his eyes as he was carried to bed. The nightmares didn’t seem relevant, not here, not with Derek touching him, not with the smell of him, comforting and familiar.  
Stiles felt his back come to rest on his mattress but no longer had the force of will to do anything about it. Derek was shifting away but Stiles could only manage to mumble,

“Stay, I wanna sleep.”

It was enough. Derek kicked off his boots, slipped off his leather jacket and crawled in beside his human. He shifted Stiles’s body over and tucked himself between stiles and the open side of the room, demurely not touching the other boy as he settled. 

“‘s good,” Stiles slurred, flopping his hand on Derek’s face accidentally. Derek grunted, removing it. Not fighting when Stiles’s fingers tangled with his. “Stay,” Stiles breathed and fell asleep.

“Not going anywhere,” Derek promised, drawing the pale hand in his up to press a fleeting kiss against the base of the boys palm, just above his wrist.

…

Sheriff Stalinski would come home from work, exhausted and terrified he’d find his son screaming himself awake again.

He’d open the door just slightly, quiet as he could, and there would be two boys on the bed where he’d expected to find one, and he would see their hands still clutched together and remember that Stiles had called this one a friend, and he would close the door gently without seeing Derek’s open, glowing eyes, or knowing that the slid shut again when he left. He wouldn’t know that Derek could have slipped out long before he was seen.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos, comments, requests, reviews and unwarranted declarations of love are always welcome! :3


End file.
